Civil War 150th Anniversary - New Jersey Style

The main reason there was no post yesterday was that I was out most of the day first doing research for the base ball pioneer project, but more importantly attending a meeting about the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War which will begin in 2011. Earlier this year I had reached out to a small group of the New Jersey Civil War community to see if there was interest in convening a group of interested parties to start discussing how New Jersey might observe this anniversary.

We had our first meeting yesterday and there was a high level of interest, commitment and belief that it is important that New Jersey observe this anniversary and do so in an appropriate way. Perhaps not surprisingly there was unanimity that the Civil War is one of the most important events in American history and that New Jersey's role is not adequately studied, taught and known. Given those in attendance none of this was a surprise, but we went on to have a good discussion about how to organize this effort with some discussion of the content. We are going to keep meeting and I am excited about being part of this effort.

As is obvious from my posts about books about Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln I have been doing a lot of thinking about the Civil War. What has become clearer to me is how much of a turning point the Civil War was in our history. Clearly before the war the United States was a nation committed to high principles, but with a cancer eating at its core - the cancer of slavery. As I wrote the other day it seems hard to believe that there was any peaceable way to end slavery which, if true, means that in this case war was the only answer and who won that war was crucial to the nation's future.

Had the south prevailed there would have been two nations, one with an economic system based on slavery and buttressed by a philosophy of racism. There might not have been slaves in the north, but as time passed it seems likely that economic relations between the two nations would have been rebuilt so that much of the north's economy would have been tied into this same system. And with an adjoining nation built on the belief of the inferiority of blacks, it is very questionable how much real progress blacks would have seen in the north even if they weren't slaves. It is also worth nothing Major Henry Hitchcock's comment after taking part in both the March to the Sea and the Carolina campaign - "Talk about negro slavery! - if we haven't seen white slaves from Atlanta to Goldsboro, I don't know what the word means." Perhaps the whole nation needed - "a new birth of freedom."

This is what makes the war so important, makes it important it is studied and remembered, and makes it important New Jersey observe this anniversary and use it as an opportunity to do something about past failures to teach this important aspect of our history. The photo that accompanies this post is one of the battle flags of the 33rd New Jersey taken shortly after the war. It became tattered in a good cause, we need to make sure that its memory is not tattered because we forgot.